Gayle Chong Kwan works with photography, video, sound, installation, and performance and weaves together documentary and fantastical approaches to explore ideas of collective and individual memory, history and expanded notions of and frustration between the senses.  Her work creates a dialectic universe, highlighting fictional contemporary mechanisms and the flowering of latter day myths. Her mise-en-scene landscapes, installations, and environments are created out of disturbing arrangements of waste, food and found materials.

Chong Kwan’s work highlights the ambiguous relationship between reality and appropriation and detoured implications, just as the Grand Tour tried to digest Classicism, mass tourism tries to digest the world in a more superficial and global way – pre-packaged, sweetened and adulterated.  Her work moves between raw and cooked and back again according to a metonymic mechanism.  It is as if the materials release their ancestral qualities and transfer them back to the view rendering it unsettled, always ready to exude and to be corrupted, to return wild. The sense of remains in her work is about survival, something that may not be standardised.

Chong Kwan has shown extensively nationally and internationally. Awards include: Vauxhall Collective Award for Photography 2009; Pepinieres Europeenes Pour Jeunes Artistes Award; Arts Council England International Fellow. Recent exhibitions include: ‘The Grand Tour’, Galerie Kernot, Paris; ‘The Eyes see more than the heart knows’, Peckham Space, London; ‘Senscape Scotland’, Vauxhall Collective, Idea Generation, London; ‘Memoryscape Moravia’,  Centro Cultural de Moravia, Medellin, Colombia; Guest/Visitor Book’, Speakeasy, Word/Play, ICA, London; 5_5Castelló09, Espai d’art contemporani de Castelló, Spain;  British Subjects: Identity and Self-Fashioning, 1966-2009, Neuberger Museum of Art, New York; Tales from the New World, 10th Havana Biennial, Cuba; ‘Utopia’, Museu Berardo, Centro Cultural do Belem, Lisbon; ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’, Platform for Art, London; ‘Conversations’, Tate Britain, London; ‘Different Worlds’, National Portrait Gallery, London; ‘Folliescape’, La Villette, Paris; European Forum Emerging Creation, Neumünster Abbey, Luxembourg; ‘Stellar Dentrite’, Tatton Park Biennial, Manchester. Residencies include: Ricefield/Scottish Arts Council Residency, Glasgow; Coast International Residency, A Foundation, Liverpool; Venice Printmaking, Italy; Macroproyecto de Moravia, Colombia; UNIDEE, Fondazione Pistoletto, Italy; Ville de Paris Residency, Cite Internationale des Arts de Paris, Paris. Born Edinburgh 1973. Lives and works in London. Holds a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art, an MSc in Communications from Stirling University, and a BA in Politics and Modern History from Manchester University.